This website is an incomplete archive of projects by Beatrice Leanza.
A cultural strategist, curator and critic, Beatrice has grown into a reference figure in the contemporary design and arts fields thank to her unique insight in the Chinese creative scene and Asian regions, and a critical practice founded on social engagement, educational empowerment and place making applied to institutional and cultural agency. She was based in Beijing for 17 years and from January 2023 is the Director of mudac – Museum of Design and Applied Arts (Lausanne – Switerland).
She has served as executive director of maat – the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon (2019 – 2021), as creative director of Beijing Design Week (2013 – 2016), and has curated, initiated and managed a variety of projects and events internationally, among which the research program Across Chinese Cities, presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale at three consecutive editions from 2014 to 2018. She has founded two creative consulting companies (BAO Atelier which closed in 2011 and B/Side Design) working with international stakeholders from the public, private and corporate sectors with an international experience stretching from Asia to Europe. She is the co-founder of The Global School, China’s first independent institute dedicated to design and creative research.
She lectures regularly at international events and institutions and has contributed to a variety of specialized publications and catalogues. Articles and interviews about her and her projects have appeared on Artforum, Abitare, CNN Style, Domus, Dezeen, Disegno, Frieze, Frame, Flash Art International, Metropolis, Monocle, The Architect Newspaper, T Magazine/The New York Times, The Guardian, IDEAT, Liberation/NEXT, The Good Life, Il Sole 24 ore, Il Corriere della Sera, Vogue Italia, among many others.
Beatrice is a member of the international advisory board of Design Trust (Hong Kong) and is a European Young Leader (2018 – present), a think tank spearheaded by the Friends of Europe Foundation in Brussel.
If you want to know more about what Bea is up to or wish to get in touch please use the contact page.
Friends, collaborators and absolute favorites can be fond browsing through the projects and detours ‘by year’ or ‘work’.
Rooted in the heart of East Asia, BAO explores "cultural making" from the locality of China, while exposing the possibilities of alternative intellectual programs and transformative gestures purported by its socio-political diversity. BAO approaches the localized dynamics of private and public unsettlement, engaging in a research-based practice to rethink existing creative formats and develop new ones to improve transnational dialogue between the politics of industry and human studies.
BAO has been established in a moment of radical changes when global economics and cultural capitalism increasingly are exposed to the organizational modes of network societies and hybrid mobile communities. It responds in essence to the reality of contemporary innovation intended as a form of collective, process-based work entailed by specialized micro-enterprises connected beyond the geographical borders and governmentalities of given environments.
BAO is a research office that utilizes the three modes of curatorial, editorial and design organization to translate the possibilities of multidisciplinary production into process and creation. Operating within diverse knowledge areas (visual arts, architecture and design, moving images, media studies, fashion and publishing) the studio entails the development of new conceptual mainstays for systemic partnerships between private, public and corporate agencies.
Conceived in a flexibly operating network, BAO's team functions as a catalyst for ideas originating from disconnected creative communities and engages them in a site/subject-specific economics from conceptualization to realization. In the acknowledgement of the increasing fragmentation adjusting social change to a fast and non-durable mass-consumption of cultural products, BAO works as an all-encompassing unit both self-initiating and customizing from small to large scale interventions to impact the public realm. BAO acts as a think-bridge supplementing clients' programs by interrogating artistic vision, architectural thinking and textual communication into integrated projects for innovation.
Grounded in divergent but complementary disciplinary and geopolitical articulations, BAO is a roundly partnership that operates through communication and cross-border collaboration with a variety of local and international cultural players and professionals, institutions and creative agencies.
BAO operates as an open-source structure able to accommodate unrelated methodologies of research and practice, targeting new subjectivities and identifying social groups as pre-empted by the "utility-driven logic" characterizing the global urban condition.